Robinsonology, or Reproducing the Culture by Budding

Alex Rozoff

1. A
comparative study of planaria and culture

A flatworm
planaria is an ingenious invention of evolution. It appeared
first about one billion years ago, and was perfectly equipped by the
standards of that time: high speed, good combat skills, vision, and a
central nervous system with learning abilities. In addition, planaria
has a feature that even more advanced species lack: any cut-off part
of the planaria body can grow all the missing rest body parts and
become a new planaria.

Now, let's talk about human and
human's culture. What will happen if we cut off a small fragment of
human society, give them some equipment and information and leave
them alone? Can several dozens of modern people reproduce their
culture in isolation from the rest of the world? If yes, what
resources can they need for this; if no, why? The modern society can
rebuild itself after a serious disaster, i.e. grow a new tail, like
lizards do, but can it grow a new body and head, like a planaria? In
other words, the question is: can the modern culture reproduce itself
by budding?

2. Culture budding in history

The
cultures of Antiquity were doing it easily. Small groups of people
traveled to uninhabited places and founded colonies, which grew into
cities rapidly. The colonists did not lose their culture with time;
quite the contrary: as Arnold Toynbee mentioned, sometimes their
society developed faster than the one in their homeland.

Reproducing
their culture by budding did not pose any problem for people up to
the 17th century. However, we have no records from the later time.
Religious sects that isolated themselves deep in the woods are not
relevant for our topic, because they consisted of insane people and
oriented for regress.

Our culture today differs from the
one of the 17th century by lifestyle and, which is way more
important, by the artificial environment that we have built for
ourselves. With some training, a modern person can survive outside
the modern urban landscape. The question is, whether modern people
can rebuild this environment by themselves.

First, let's
study what the writers of fiction books were thinking on this. At the
end of the 19th century, the majority of authors were optimists on
this issue. Jules Verne in 'The Mysterious Island' (1875) and Mark
Twain in 'Yankee in King Arthur's Court' (1889) depicted active
individuals able to rebuild the technologies of that time from
scratch in several years. By the middle of the 20th century,
novelists believed that thousands of people and a vast amount of
equipment and resources are necessary for this, as John Wyndham in
'The Day of the Triffids' (1951) and Francis Carsac in 'The Robinsons
of the Cosmos' (1955). The 1950s were actually the moment when the
fracture happened. Robert Heinlein in 'Tunnel in the Sky' (1955)
showed a group of colonists that did not even try to reproduce modern
technologies and decided to live as hunters and gatherers. In
'Orphans of the Sky' (1963) he described a space expedition that
degraded to the Middle-Ages level due to social and psychological
issues. Peter Zsoldos in 'The Superproblem' (1970) represents the
task of rebuilding the modern technologies as repeating the whole way
of human evolution since the pithecanthropes. Ury Zabello in 'Planet
for the Robinsons' (1991) shows space colonists intentionally
building a slave-owning society on another planet.

3.
Discussion on progress and regress

Internet
discussions on the problem of reproducing the modern culture by a
small isolated group of people show that people's view on it are
exactly the same as science fiction writers are describing it today.
Nobody even dreams on reproduction of the 21st century technologies.
The greatest optimists just hope for long stable work of existing
equipment, while most of the others believe that an isolated group of
people is predestined to degrade to the stone age level.

Why
do I consider this issue worth a serious discussion, and the
aforementioned opinions of people to be a serious defect of the
modern society? The problem is not space colonization (although this
can also become actual quite soon), but the absolutely irrational
psychological dependence of the 21st century people from the
infrastructure they are living in.

The degradation of an
isolated colony to below the level of the late 19th century can have
no reasonable excuse. This Vernian level of technology can be
reproduced with simple tools and technical college textbooks. If we
add some inventions of the 20th century that don't require any
extensive industry (penicillin, for example) and suppose that the
colonists are not limited in natural resources, we can conclude that
their level of comfort is quite acceptable even for modern people. I
don't say anything about the possible inventions of the near future,
such as self-assembling robots, which could also greatly help in our
case.

Therefore, the pessimism on the issue of reproducing
the modern culture by a small group of people has nothing to do with
any technical problems. The fact that an individual expects to become
absolutely helpless without the existing social and economic
mechanisms is a purely psychological issue.

4.
Three defects of the modern culture

Today, even a
person with engineering education hardly knows the production cycle
of the things he is using in everyday life. Principally he could be
able to make some things for himself and his family, but this idea
looks so weird for him that he is psychologically not ready for this.
Individuals who are producing things for themselves instead of buying
them are viewed as freaks. It's become the social norm to be unable
to do even simple technical work at home; and this is a
problem.

Another, even more annoying, problem is the
inability to build relationships with other people in the absence of
any controlling state institutions. People are so much used to law
and morality regulating everything that they cannot imagine life
without this. They believe that without such regulation the world
would collapse into chaos and violence. People don't even know that
the ability to build mutually beneficial relationships with others is
an instinct of human beings, i.e. every mentally healthy individual
can do it without any control from the social institutions. Our
upbringing and education suppresses our instincts of communication
and makes us dependent from social regulations; this is probably the
main problem.

A common person today suffers from two
irrational dependences:
1) from mass production and economy;
2)
from moral and other social regulations.
This leads also to the
third one: dependence on education institutions in bringing up
children.

Ancient peoples were able to reproduce their
culture easily. Each of their colonies kept all the knowledge from
its homeland and continued to develop it at the new place. Otherwise
the human civilization would have died out at any serious climate
change. If our pessimistic views on the problem of reproducing our
culture in a small isolated group of people are right, this puts the
future of our civilization in question. Sooner or later, something
will happen on Earth and destroy the infrastructure we are living in,
and we will be unable to rebuild it back.

However, an
optimistic view on this issue exists too, although it gets rarely
expressed directly. When discussing the possible staff of the colony
that should reproduce our culture in isolation, everybody agreed that
scientists, engineers and medics are an absolute must. Some people
suggested to include also pedagogues, psychologists and artists. The
most significant is that nobody at all wanted politicians,
financiers or managers to be there. There were proposals to
create a new religion that should worship science and technology.
Some people even said that it would be better if everything else
degraded except the science and technology. Also, people considered
science fiction to be the most important genre of literature for the
colonists, and that education in the colony needs to be oriented
mostly toward developing curiosity and ingenuity in engineering
spheres.

5. The basis and the superstructure. Cui
prodest?

Karl Marx is out of fashion now, but one of
his ideas can reveal the source of the problem; I mean the idea that
any society consists of the basis – the technologies that it uses
in production and in social life, and the superstructure – the
institutes of social administration. As we can see in discussions on
the task of reproducing our culture in a small isolated colony,
people agree on the point that it's the basis that needs to be
reproduced, while the superstructure is not necessary and can be even
harmful. This is because cultural errors accumulate in the
superstructure. In the Antiquity, it was a common situation that an
isolated colony developed a more advanced culture than the one of its
homeland, because they dropped their old superstructure and built a
more effective new one. Unlike a planaria tail, a cut-off piece of
society appears to be able to grow a better head than it had
before.

In science fiction literature, we can see some
hints on the necessity do drop the old superstructure. Isaac Asimov's
trilogy on the Spacers – 'The Caves of Steel' (1954), 'The Naked
Sun' (1957) and 'The Robots of Dawn' (1983) – is the most prominent
in this regard. However, Asimov did not show us how those space
colonies were founded; probably, the problem of reproducing culture
by budding seemed unsolvable with the 20th century technologies for
him, but he was sure that in the future it would become
possible.

Now we can answer the last question: who made up
this myth of inevitable degradation of an isolated colony without the
social superstructure? The Ancient Romans were saying “Qui
prodest?”, i.e. “Who benefits of it?” in such cases.
It's obvious that this is just the superstructure of our society
itself. The establishment: politicians, big business, etc. –
want us to believe that we cannot survive without them. This is
not a problem of future space colonies; this is a problem of our life
today.